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These days, it's no big deal to walk into your local car dealership and drive out in a shiny new car with a reliable, quiet four-wheel-drive system that lets you navigate those icy mall parking lots with ease. Where's the fun in that?

Back in the late 1980s, when Mazda 323 GTXs and Honda Civic 4WD Wagovans were spitting out drivetrain components on muddy fire roads and beer-bottle-strewn construction sites across the land, real men knew that nothing said "driving enjoyment" like a 19-mile trudge back to civilization after your Japanese AWD machine proved somewhat less sturdy than your buddy's AMC Eagle.

Now that I've moved to Denver from Northern California, I've been shopping for something old, Japanese and all-wheel-drive as my winter driver--but it has to be cheap. And cool.

A sample of the many Mitsubishi VR-4 projects in various states of decrepitude across the country.

Remember how exciting WRC Group A was back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Mitsubishi Galant VR-4s were out there proving that not all Mitsus were as boring as the Dodge Colt? Only a few thousand VR-4s were sold in the United States as part of the homologation effort, and—to judge by the expletive-laden tirades one hears from single-interest Mitsubishi zealots in online car forums—they are nearly impossible to find at any reasonable price today.

The imps in the Hell Garage don't pay any mind to the Mitsubishi zealots, dear readers. Instead, they hit Crazedlist to find some steeped-in-hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitanereality! For you, and your eternity in your personal Hell Garage.

It turns out that you can find VR-4 projects, in varying states of decrepitude restoration, across the country and for the sort of money you'd expect to pay for a 300,000-mile Mirage with bad CV joints. This one in Kentucky (go here if the listing disappears), for example, which is described as the seller's (long-term project), with the parentheses no doubt subbing for stronger language. It has been sitting for "about 4 years," which the Hell Garage Craiglist Ad Translator interprets as "it's been so long that I can't quite remember, but I think Bill Clinton was president back then." And then there's the lack of any sort of registration paperwork beyond a bill of sale.

How hard could it be to convince the friendly, eager-to-help employees of your state's DMV to issue you a new pink slip? In Project Car Heaven, not hard at all! Once you drag this fine piece of racing history home, you'll need to fix the "minimal" rust and work on getting the running gear in order again. The seller includes the following statement, which by strange coincidence turns out to the statement carved in the Hell Garage's Fiery Furnace of Wrenching Pain: "All the parts I have will come with the car and that is probably 95% of the parts to get it running." A thousand bucks! You can't go wrong!

Two Subaru XT6s for $850, as confusing as the Space Battleship Yamato mixed with the Toyota MR2 and the Triumph TR7.

Racing provenance is all right, as far as it goes, but the best Japanese cars of the late-1980s/early-1990s were really all about weird gadgets and design that looked like something from hallucinatory science-fiction comic books. The Galant VR-4 was quite a car and sufficiently flaky to qualify as a true Hell Project, but Mitsubishi had turned its back on the incomprehensible digital instruments and Mars Base interior layout that made the Cordia and the Tredia such lovable puzzlers back in the day.

Subaru, however, stayed true to the futuristic program with its Alcyone line, taking advantage of the shape of its boxer engines to create a vehicle with all of the most confusing best elements of the Triumph TR7, the Toyota MR2 and the Space Battleship Yamato. Those who wish to add a Subaru XT—as the North American Alcyone was called—face a dilemma from the outset: Do you get the XT6, with its heavy and troublesome powerful boxer-six, or do you go for the XT Turbo, with its Delysidic instrument cluster.

In this case, we've decided that the XT Turbo is just too simple, even with the amazing cockpit, and we've dredged the Lake of Fire for this pair of 1988 Subaru XT6s (go here if the listing disappears) in California's Gold Country for a just-barely-over-scrap-price of $850.

Yes, my friends, that's two reasonably complete-looking XT6s in a nonrusty region for a mere $425 apiece! The seller had planned to make a 24 Hours of Le Mons car out of them, but "decided to go Mustang instead" (and when I, in my role as Chief Justice of the Le Mons Supreme Court, find out which team ditched an XT6 racer in favor of a so-boring-I-can't-even-type-its-name-again Ford . . well, it won't be pretty).

But, hey, making a race car out of these cars would be too easy! You'll want to restore the least horrible nicer of the two to showroom condition and then drive it year-round. Hey, how hard would it be to swap the big EZ36 out of the current Outback into that cramped engine compartment? And while you're at it, you might as well transfer that digital instrument cluster from the XT Turbo to your XT6, finding some way to make the loony bar-graph tach display correctly with two additional cylinders. As for XT interior parts, you'll develop some long-lasting friendships with shut-in Subaru parts hoarders interesting Subaru aficionados around the country as you search for missing bits for your car.